I would like to thank Meggie and her son, Bob, for helping me understand what Lionel was saying. Meggie wrote to Bob, and received the correct spelling. The entire quote below is from his email her her. Incidentally, the picture of the Babycham Cocktail Glasses (which are highly collectible) was found on a UK Shopping website.
"In the late '50s the British drinks industry came up with something called Babycham---a small (about the size of an airline wine) bottle of sickeningly sweet sparkling white wine: a 'baby champagne'. Sophisticated girls-about-town would ask their boyfriends for one when they went down the local Regent Dance Hall for a bop.
The marketing was clever: only girls ever drank it, and the label had
an appealing baby deer on the front. I would like to think that this is
supposed to be a baby chamois ... employed to circumvent any French indignation of using 'cham' to imply 'champagne'. If so, their ad
agency was aiming far above their market's heads---I wouldn't think more
than one in five thousand people would connect the 'shammy leather' used
to
polish their Austin Eleven with such doe-eyed denizens of the Dolomites.
Keep in mind that the '50s mean something very different over here---no beehive hairdos and Cadillac fins and Elvis, but continued rationing, Vespa scooters, and skiffle: good girls were increasingly going to pubs, and the traditional drinks their mums would have had (Martini and lime, stout and blackcurrant, port and lemon, whiskey and ginger) were all men's drinks plus some concentrated fruit syrup. The fact that the second of these is basically Guinness with a slug of Ribena proves how ripe womankind was for some alternative beverage, and Babycham was wildly popular for decades afterwards: it was new and exotic in a drab, cold little country, and served in a cocktail glass with a cherry---oh, so very posh, innit? On the whole, perfectly suited to that awkward moment when boy meets girl and boy orders girl drink.
Babycham continued to be the cast-iron UK default drink for girls in pubs and dances and parties basically until the late '80s: girls were still ordering it when I was at Oxford, despite more palatable alternatives. ... Since then they've tried marketing it in different ways---putting a cool pair of shades on the baby deer, and even making a 'dry' version, but sales continue to decline in the face of alcopops. While it's still to be found in nearly every off-licence and pub throughout the land, people nowadays drink it more out of nostalgia or a heightened sense of camp than anything else: it's still popular among blowsy divorcees and effete gays.
So yes, trying to get a girl drunk with Babycham is instantly redolent of a certain age and context: you can imagine Saturday night in a suburban pub circa 1963, Cliff Richard playing on the jukebox, and some hopeful lad ordering tiny bottle after tiny bottle of this noxious liquid for his giggling girlfriend, only to have her rush out into the car park and be spectacularly sick all over the bonnet of his Mini."